Robert Caro and L.B.J. in the Archive

This week, the magazine publishes Robert A. Caro’s account of Lyndon Johnson’s accession to the Presidency after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The article is taken from the forthcoming book, “The Passage of Power,” which is the fourth installment in Caro’s multi-volume biography, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson.” Caro has been researching and writing about the life of our thirty-sixth President for more than three decades—and his work is not complete. A fifth volume, on the later years of Johnson’s Presidency, is still to come.

Caro began his career as a biographer with “The Power Broker,” his 1974 book about Robert Moses, which was excerpted in four parts in The New Yorker. Since 1989, seven previous portions of Caro’s biography of Johnson have appeared in our pages as well. To mark the publication of the latest, we have unlocked all of Caro’s previous pieces on Johnson in our archive. Here’s a guide:

“The Johnson Years: A Congressman Goes to War,” November 6, 1989. On Johnson’s early career and military service. “For ten years he had been regarded as a winner in Washington. Now he would be going back to Washington as a loser. So going back was hard.”

“The Johnson Years: The Old and the New—Whirlwind,” January 22, 1990. On Johnson’s political ambitions and the 1948 Senate race. “Presidents, he told the young aide, were known by their initials. ‘F.D.R.—L.B.J., F.D.R.—L.B.J. Do you get it? What I want is for people to start thinking of me in terms of initials.’”

“The Johnson Years: The Old and the New—The Stealing,” February 5, 1990. How Johnson won the 1948 Democratic Senate primary by stealing votes. “The unwritten laws, the ethics, the morals of Texas politics were so loose and elastic that it was difficult to break them. Yet Lyndon Johnson had broken them.”

“Annals of Politics: The Orator of the Dawn,” March 4, 2002. On Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson. “No man, in 1951, would have seemed less likely to be an instrument of compromise than Humphrey; no senator, indeed, would have seemed less likely to be anyone’s tool.”

“Annals of Politics: The Compassion of Lyndon Johnson,” April 1, 2002. On Johnson’s attitudes to race and civil rights. “The victories that Lyndon Johnson won for civil rights began even before his Presidency—in 1957—and the victory he won in that year was perhaps the hardest-won victory of all.”